Java has generic type erasure: The actual type T is not available to code at runtime. Since Gson needs to know what the target deserialization type is, passing the Class<T> explicitly identifies it.

Kotlin, on the other hand, has a somewhat stronger type system than Java, and since the function there is inlined, the compiler knows what the generic type actually is (the reified keyword). The construct T::class.java tells the Kotlin compiler to determine what the appropriate type T is and then inline the class reference to T.

This inline redefinition is essentially syntactic sugar for Kotlin, allowing Kotlin users to delegate the hardcoded specification of the destination type to the compiler's inference.

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